It's happening already. Waiters at New York City restaurants are starting to introduce themselves to customers by saying, "I'm a blogger--I'm just doing this while I wait for my big break."

Selling media is a lonely place to live from nine to five. Your bosses want you out of the office, while clients don't really want you in theirs.

Last week, news of Pluck's blogger content syndication initiative, dubbed "BlogBurst," leaked into the media industry consciousness through, naturally, mentions on a handful of well-read blogs.

Before you sign on or renew agreements with companies that harvest inventory you have grown, you should consider the money you lose with every dollar you make leasing out your inventory to a third-party seller.

I still can't watch Super Bowl ads without thinking about 1999 and 2000, and the frenzy then to "aggregate eyeballs." No term has become so archaic so quickly. And that's a shame, because while the theory and actual execution of "aggregating eyeballs" six years ago was often folly at its worst and suspect at its best, the need for online publishers to continually innovate in consumer marketing has not changed.

This column is in honor of Peter King, famed football columnist for Sports Illustrated. I borrowed the section header of his popular weekly column on Si.com for the title of my column today.

At last week's WOMMA Conference in Orlando, 440 people turned out to spend an intense two days learning how word-of-mouth marketing could bring them more customers. Many of the case studies presented focused on elements of online publishing--but few of these examples were provided by the companies normally considered online publishers.

The goal of a media buyer is to purchase the least possible amount of wasted exposure from a publisher. Definitions aside of what constitutes such wasted exposure, paying for it increases the "cost per something" cells bolded and highlighted on the spreadsheet featured in the post-buy analysis.

Despite the hypergrowth of blogging, podcasting, video blogging, photocasting and the other output of small online publishers, the 80/20 rule still holds true for online publisher ad revenues--that 80 percent of the revenues are generated by the top 20 percent of publishers.

When your boss asks, "How was your Christmas?" your answer is not nearly as important as the desired effect this common post-holiday question is meant to produce, which is, "welcome back to the grind, I hope you're ready."